Today's world of parallel and distributed computing poses hard new challenges for software development. A rapidly increasing number of developers now have to deal with races, deadlocks, non-determinism, and we are ill-equipped to do so. How can we keep things simple, in spite of the complexity of the underlying runtimes?

In my keynote I present some of the core technology that was developed in Scala to deal with the parallelism challenge: Parallel collections, actors, and parallel domain-specific languages. They have in common that each involves a sophisticated implementation, yet provides a simple, intuitive toolkit to the developer.

About Martin Odersky (Typesafe):Martin Odersky is the inventor of the Scala language, a professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Chairman and Chief Architect of Typesafe. His work concentrates on the fusion of functional and object-oriented programming. He believes the two paradigms are two sides of the same coin, to be unified as much as possible. To prove this, he has worked on a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Functional Nets. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the current javac reference compiler.